David Sirota follows
the breadcrumb trail to that question. Here's how he gets there:
Before I tell you who I think it might be, let's just go through what we know. Rove now admits he learned of the classified information from a journalist (which of course does not excuse him from going and confirming that information to another "journalist" like Bob Novak). It's very possible that person was Judith Miller, but that's not really important - what is important is that the journalist got the information from someone else...someone higher up.
More below...
Novak has given us a clue about who this higher up is. He says it was "no partisan gunslinger." Not that Novak's description should be taken as 100 percent credible - he is a partisan hack after all. But still, the question is who would someone like Bob Novak make that description of?
I'd like to think it was Vice President Dick Cheney, but even Novak wouldn't describe him in those terms, and I do believe Cheney is too smart and too keen to his own self-preservation to get himself directly involved in something like this. So again, who is an official who is up in the White House stratosphere that can't just be fired, that isn't a "partisan gunslinger?"
I'm thinking we need to start asking Condoleezza Rice some questions. Now, I say that having no proof at all that she was involved. I'm just trying to read what we do know. And if you think about it, Rice really should be on the hot seat. Here is a person who came out of academia and who might not have the appreciation for how quickly you can get burnt down for leaking classified info, and who might think that's all part of "how its done" in Washington's partisan battles.
Furthermore, Rice is not well known as a "partisan gunslinger" (even though she is). Also, she was the face of the Bush administration in the lead up to war - she was the front person in defending all the administration's WMD claims, she was talking to all sorts of reporters trying to make the WMD threat seem as menacing as possible. She was the one who allowed Bush's reference to Iraq supposedly buying uranium from Niger to get into the State of the Union address, and then denied it by laughably pretending she never read the intelligence reports debunking the claim - as if we are expected to believe that.
As Sirota notes, Condi pleaded ignorance to the doubts raised by the CIA about the Niger claim Bush used in his SOTU:
[Rice] has since become enmeshed in the controversy over the administration's use of intelligence about Iraq's weapons in the run-up to war. She has been made to appear out of the loop by colleagues' claims that she did not read or recall vital pieces of intelligence. And she has made statements about U.S. intelligence on Iraq that have been contradicted by facts that later emerged.
The remarks by Rice and her associates raise two uncomfortable possibilities for the national security adviser. Either she missed or overlooked numerous warnings from intelligence agencies seeking to put caveats on claims about Iraq's nuclear weapons program, or she made public claims that she knew to be false.
Most prominent is her claim that the White House had not heard about CIA doubts about an allegation that Iraq sought uranium in Africa before the charge landed in Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28; in fact, her National Security Council staff received two memos doubting the claim and a phone call from CIA Director George J. Tenet months before the speech. Various other of Rice's public characterizations of intelligence documents and agencies' positions have been similarly cast into doubt.
"If Condi didn't know the exact state of intel on Saddam's nuclear programs . . . she wasn't doing her job," said Brookings Institution foreign policy specialist Michael E. O'Hanlon. "This was foreign policy priority number one for the administration last summer, so the claim that someone else should have done her homework for her is unconvincing."
Rice declined to be interviewed for this article. NSC officials said each of Rice's public statements is accurate. "It was and is the judgment of the intelligence community that Saddam Hussein was attempting to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program," said Michael Anton, an NSC spokesman.
Still, a person close to Rice said that she has been dismayed by the effect on Bush. "She knows she did badly by him, and he knows that she knows it," this person said.
...
Four days later, Rice's deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, said in a second White House briefing that he did not mention doubts raised by the CIA about an African uranium claim Bush planned to make in an October speech (the accusation, cut from that speech, reemerged in Bush's State of the Union address). Hadley said he did not mention the objections to Rice because "there was no need." Hadley said he does not recall ever discussing the matter with Rice, suggesting she was not aware that the sentence had been removed.
Hadley said he could not recall discussing the CIA's concerns about the uranium claim, which was based largely on British intelligence. He said a second memo from the CIA protesting the claim was sent to Rice, but "I can't tell you she read it. I can't tell you she received it." Rice herself used the allegation in a January op-ed article.
And here's where the latest revelations make this all so interesting. Further down the July 2003 WaPo article contains this little nugget:
In Rice's July 11 briefing, on Air Force One between South Africa and Uganda, she said the CIA and the White House had "some discussion" on the Africa uranium sentence in Bush's State of the Union address. "Some specifics about amount and place were taken out," she said. Asked about how the language was changed, she replied: "I'm going to be very clear, all right? The president's speech -- that sentence was changed, right? And with the change in that sentence, the speech was cleared. Now, again, if the agency had wanted that sentence out, it would have gone. And the agency did not say that they wanted that speech out -- that sentence out of the speech. They cleared the speech. Now, the State of the Union is a big speech, a lot of things happen. I'm really not blaming anybody for what happened."
Three days later, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Rice told him she was not referring to the State of the Union address, as she had indicated, but to Bush's October speech. That explanation, however, had a flaw: The sentence was removed from the October speech, not cleared.
And yet today in Newsweek we read that "some discussion" included a binder labeled TOP SECRET, with information all about Joe Wilson and the uranium issue:
Meanwhile, in transatlantic secure phone calls, the message machinery focused on a crucial topic: who should carry the freight on the following Sunday's talk shows? The message: protect Cheney by explaining that he had had nothing to do with sending Wilson to Niger, and dismiss the yellowcake issue. Powell was ruled out. He wasn't a team player, as he had proved by his dismissive comments about the "sixteen words." Donald Rumsfeld was pressed into duty, as was Condi Rice, the ultimate good soldier. She was on the Africa trip with the president, though, and wouldn't be getting back until Saturday night. To allow her to prepare on the long flight home to D.C., White House officials assembled a briefing book, which they faxed to the Bush entourage in Africa. The book was primarily prepared by her National Security Council staff. It contained classified information--perhaps including all or part of the memo from State. The entire binder was labeled TOP SECRET.
...
As NEWSWEEK has reported, Cooper later wrote an e-mail to his bureau chief, saying that Rove had tried to wave him off the Wilson story--and mentioned Wilson's wife in the process: "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD issues who authorized the trip," Cooper's e-mail read. Cooper would write about the matter online the following week, after the Novak article appeared. (Rove did not initially discuss the conversation with Cooper in his first interview with the FBI, a source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because of the ongoing investigation, told NEWSWEEK. But Rove later testified about it, the source said.) That weekend, the talk-show soldiers did their duty. Rumsfeld drew the fire on other issues; Condi did her best to distance the vice president from the Wilson trip.
Missions accomplished. Except for a few little details. Under a 1982 law, it's a felony to intentionally disclose the name of a "covered" agent with the intent to harm national security. Under another, older statute, it could also be a felony to willfully disclose information from a classified document--which the State Department memo and, apparently, the Condi briefing book were. There is no indication that Rove saw the briefing book (Rumsfeld didn't get one) or that anyone disclosed classified information. But no one in the administration seems to have noticed the irony--or the legal danger--in assembling a TOP SECRET briefing book as guidance for the Sunday talk shows. Exactly what papers with what classifications were floating around on Air Force One? Who, if anyone, was dipping into them for info about the Wilson trip?
Applying Occam's Razor leads me to this question: if it was Condi's TOP SECRET book assembled by a staff led by the aforementioned Steven Hadley, why wouldn't she be the most likely one to have passed the classified information about Valerie Plame along? Is this just staring everyone in the face and they can't see it? Sirota does and sums up his thinking thus:
[S]uddenly, Joe Wilson comes along and debunks the whole thing. That means Rice would have had not only a broad motive to defend the White House, but a personal motive to defend her own competence: Wilson's proof that the Iraq-uranium-Niger thing was bogus was a direct indictment against Rice, because she was personally supposed to vet the State of the Union address and the specific claims in question before they were aired. And, as we know, the leak of Wilson's wife's name came as a means to discredit Wilson's debunking of the Iraq-Niger claim
To add a few more salient points. We know that after he talked to Cooper, Rove emailed Hadley:
Rove told then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley in the July 11, 2003, e-mail that he had spoken with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and tried to caution him away from some allegations that CIA operative Valerie Plame's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.
I read that and skipped over it the first time. Now that email to Hadley looks a bit more suspect. Via AmericaBlog, we also know that Rice has been called in by Fitzgerald to testify.
From the Wash Post, November 26, 2004:
Among those who are known to have been interviewed by the FBI or testified before the grand jury are Bush White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, political adviser Karl Rove, Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis I. Libby, Republican National Committee consultant Mary Matalin, former Cheney press aide Catherine Martin, White House press secretary Scott McClellan, communications director Dan Bartlett, deputy press secretary Claire Buchan, and former assistant press secretary Adam Levine. Bush and Cheney also have been interviewed, as has Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
Finally, dkos' own grand-moff-texan follows the trail from Miller to Rice, along the way taking us back to the infamous NYT story containing the most manipulative phrase of the buildup to the Iraq war: that the WMD smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud. Faithful readers won't be surprised to learn that the story was co-written by Miller and the quote came from Rice:
Miller refused to say who some of those other sources were, claiming their identities were sacrosanct. Nonetheless, her reportage appeared to reflect Chalabi's intelligence gathering and his political cant. At his behest, she interviewed defectors from Hussein's regime, who claimed without substantiation that there was still a clandestine WMD program operating inside Iraq. U.S. investigators now believe that Chalabi sent these same Iraqi expatriates to at least eight Western spy agencies as part of a scheme to persuade them to overthrow Saddam. An unknown number of them appear to have stopped along the way to speak with Miller.
If the double-agent spy business had a trophy to hold up and show neophyte spooks what happens when their craft is perfectly executed, it would be a story by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on a Sunday morning in September 2002. The front-page frightener was titled "Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts." Miller and Gordon wrote that an intercepted shipment of aluminum tubes, to be used as centrifuges, was evidence Hussein was building a uranium gas separator to develop nuclear material. The story quoted national security advisor Condoleezza Rice invoking the image of "mushroom clouds over America."
All of this leads me to a couple of questions for us partisan political junkies/defenders of Liberty and Truth: By focusing too hard on Rove are we missing the bigger fish, namely our current Secretary of State and the president's righthand woman? By hoping too hard it's Cheney are we ignoring evidence staring us in the face? Finally, by paying any attention as to why Powell's name came up, are we being suckered again by double supersecret administration lackeys who by and large hated the man and have good reason to want to smear him with this?
Again, this is all speculation. But it makes a lot more sense to me that Miller is protecting Rice, not Rove, since Judy could easily have joined Cooper in his reading of Luskin's statement to the WSJ that "if If Matt Cooper is going to jail to protect a source it's not Karl he's protecting." Luskin notably didn't include Miller, which is odd since Luskin could easily have done so in exactly the same breath. And it also passes the smell test that, in an attempt to make up for screwing up previously, Rice would turn into an overtly partisan gunslinger to protect her husband the president.
So the question I think the MSM should ask Rice now is has she or will she give un-coerced releases to all reporters or columnists about any and all background or deep background statements that she might have made about Joe Wilson and Valerie Wilson/Plame, as Rove and Libby claimed to have done? And let's see where that takes us.
cross posted at my left wing